


Save the Last Dance for Me

by emeralddarkness



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 08:43:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1812256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emeralddarkness/pseuds/emeralddarkness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>May 12, 1945. 8:00 on the dot, and don't you dare be late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Save the Last Dance for Me

It was only four days after V-E Day and the newspapers were still shouting the news, as they doubtless would for quite some time. They had done it and everyone, even newsmakers, wanted to celebrate. If she hadn’t been who she was, Peggy wasn’t sure she would be able to get in; ordinary soldiers or civilians would likely have a very difficult time at this, or indeed most, nightclubs. But she went all the same, a little early to be sure of getting in, and by 7:45 took a table in one of the back corners to listen to the band. They were playing something ragtime, upbeat and cheerful, and everyone around her was dancing and laughing.

She ordered champagne – to celebrate, she told the waiter with bright eyes and a bright smile. She kept that smile fixed on her bright red lips as she positioned herself to watch the door, because it wouldn’t do for Steve to come in and see-

To see-

He didn’t come.

By 8:30, when he still wasn’t there, two men had already come over and asked if she wanted to dance, and she’d looked up at both of them with the same bright eyes and bright smile and told them no thank you, she was meeting someone here. It made sense for him to be late, she told herself as they walked off, and so perhaps she’d make allowance for him just this once. He did have to make his way here from God knew where, and Steve Rogers did at this point have a record of showing up after everyone was ready to write him off. So, although she had told him not to be late, perhaps she would make an allowance just this once. As long as he arrived soon she would.

By 10:00 another three men had approached her, and the music was turning sweet and slow. “Embrace me,” crooned the man on the stage with a voice as sweet as honey and rich as cream, “you irreplaceable you.” The music left her heart in her throat, and when the sixth man since she had sat down came up – politely enough, she supposed later – to ask if she cared to dance, Peggy had stood up so quickly that she knocked her chair over.

“I thank you for taking the trouble of asking me. I realize you couldn’t possibly know this, but I am waiting for someone else, not sitting here alone for my health.”

He’d made apologies that she wasn’t at all sure were sincere and retreated again to the cloud of smoke that was the table of him and his friends, where they’d looked at her and smirked as they talked about her, and Peggy discovered she could no longer bear it. She fled the room, into the drizzle outside, where she took refuge under an awning and tried to blink away tears before they found their way to her cheeks.

She waited there for five hours, in the curling damp that was the closest she’d yet seen New York come to imitating London, listening to the music from the lounge and framing clever ways to ask where a person had been, or if all the cabs had been taken, until the people left the club, until the musicians had packed their instruments and left carrying them in cases under their arms, until the staff had finished leaving and the last of the light bulbs were turned off. Then, next to the completely dark Stork Club, she’d waited even longer, until she finally accepted that even if he walked up to her she was too blind with tears to be able to recognize him. Then, and only then, she turned and walked back to her rooms, where she took out the last of the pins that were falling out of her hair and pulled off her shoes, and then sat on her bed in the dark, all alone.

They had given her his file, complete with the photograph of what he'd been before he was Captain America, the photograph of the time when he wouldn't have died crashing a Hydra airship that had been damaged beyond the point of a safe landing somewhere in the North Atlantic to save everyone on the Eastern Seaboard, for the very simple reason that he wouldn't have been allowed near it in the first place. He hadn't changed, really, only the scope of things he was allowed to influence had. As her eyes adjusted to the dim illumination afforded by the outside street lights (and it had been so strange after London, coming to America where blackout regulations weren't in effect) she fetched that photo out and wondered if it was selfish of her to think of what it might have been if he'd never been chosen for the program at all. In all likelihood what would have happened was that a lot of good men would be dead, instead of just one. The POWs he'd rescued would likely all have died. Hydra would have been able to continue operations unmolested, and so their attack would have been if anything a great deal worse. It very likely would have been Germany that won the war, not the Allies. That was too high a price to pay for the life of any man, even such a man as he.

She could not wish him back to life, and was not given to fancy, and so she did not talk to his picture as she sat there in the middle of the night. She only tried to imagine him, blonde hair and determined blue eyes, twice the man of the rest in the platoon even when he was half the size. He'd be concerned to see her acting like this, she thought, or maybe he'd understand, after Barnes. But it wasn't fair, after she'd told him to respect his friend's choice. It wasn't at all fair.

Peggy curled close around her photograph and closed her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd love to get a review with your thoughts!


End file.
